Lunchtime read: The Best Short Stories

Again the voices you hear are those of a collection of inanimate objects and animals. This is a clever story not just about mans fight with nature but the price of progress as a traditional mill is forced to embrace modern technology.

Below the Mill DamThe water is gushing down and putting strain on the old Mill wheels and the cat and the rat watch the Mill struggle to cope with the pressure. At the same time the Mill owner is rigging up electricity using the power of the water. After initially pouring scorn on the whole idea of turbines and electricity the Mill changes its tunes and accepts that it will have to change and embrace the technology. The cat turns to talk to her old friend the rat about how things have changed but the rat has been stuffed by the engineer who labelled it as a Black Rat.

The fate of the rat brings a rye smile because of cause keeping the past stuffed and kept in jars is exactly one sort of fate that would have been left for the Mill had it not embraced change.